Images Against Oblivion
Remembering the Holocaust Through Art and Photographs
Each year, the 27th of January, consecrated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marks the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps. Across nations, commemorations rehearse the language of loss: six million Jewish lives extinguished, millions more destroyed in the widening circles of racial and political persecution. Yet history, when spoken only in numbers, risks abstraction, for magnitude may be quantified, but presence cannot. It is often the image that restores what statistics efface.
A child standing behind barbed wire, his coat too thin for winter. A woman meeting the camera’s gaze, her hair shorn, her expression unreadable. A drawing of a house that will never again be inhabited. Such fragments breach the distance between past and present. They recover singularity where genocide imposed anonymity. Through photographs and art, the Holocaust ceases to be solely an event in history and becomes, once more, a human encounter. From the earliest years of persecution, visual expression assumed an uneasy dual function. The Nazi regime mobilized photography as an instrument of domination, classification, and humiliation. Concurrently, Jewish families preserved private photographs as fragile archives of continuity and belonging. Within ghettos and camps, artists transformed scraps of paper, stolen pencils, and fragments of charcoal into acts of testimony. Their aim was not aesthetic triumph but existential resistance: to leave behind a trace where erasure was policy.
History, when spoken only in numbers, risks abstraction, for magnitude may be quantified, but presence cannot. It is often the image that restores what statistics efface.
As media historian Barbie Zelizer has emphasized in her work Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (1998), Holocaust photographs function as mediating structures of memory, shaping not only what later generations know about the catastrophe but also the affective and ethical frameworks through which it becomes intelligible. Artists who confronted the Holocaust in visual form did so under the burden of an aporetic task: to render legible an experience that shattered the language of representation itself. Among the earliest such works is Lama Sabachthani (“My God, why have you forsaken me?”) by the Polish-Jewish painter Morris Kestelman. The canvas gathers Jewish mourners around a mound of unburied bodies, their grief monumental yet intimate. Its biblical title reverberates with theological despair, framing catastrophe not merely as historical fact but as metaphysical rupture.
Other artists bore witness more directly to the aftermath of destruction. The artist Edgar Ainsworth visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after liberation and recorded the scene in his drawing, Belsen: April 1945, in which he sketched various aspects of the camp. The work records skeletal figures, collapsed shelters, and the mute devastation of disease and starvation. These sketches function as historical documents, yet their trembling lines can also be perceived to register the shock of vision itself: the artist’s struggle to comprehend what had been made visible. Few works embody the convergence of art, memory, and annihilation as fully as Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre?— a sequence of 769 painted scenes created while she was in hiding in southern France between 1941 and 1942. Blending autobiography, visual narrative, and musical annotation, Salomon constructed a fragile theatre of remembrance in the face of encroaching death. She was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and murdered shortly after arrival. Her work now occupies a central place in the collections of Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. Such creations testify not only to suffering, but to the persistence of imagination under conditions designed to extinguish it.
Liberation did not bring to a close the labor of representation. Literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, in her work The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012), describes what followed as postmemory: a form of remembrance transmitted not through direct experience, but through images, stories, and silences so deeply internalized that they assume the force of memory itself. Among postwar artists, Anselm Kiefer has emerged as one of the central figures in depicting the cultural and moral aftermath of the Holocaust. Born in 1945, he did not witness the camps, yet his work is saturated with their moral residue. In Margarethe (1981), inspired by Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” and Goethe’s Faust, strands of straw stand in for golden hair, transforming cultural beauty into an emblem of devastation. In Sternenfall (Falling Stars, 1998), Kiefer depicts a sky with celestial bodies that are numbered, alluding to the tattooed numerals inscribed on prisoners’ arms. His paintings thus do not reconstruct the camps; they map the psychic and cultural wreckage left behind.
Holocaust photographs function as mediating structures of memory, shaping not only what later generations know about the catastrophe but also the affective and ethical frameworks through which it becomes intelligible.
Contemporary artists continue this inheritance, extending visual remembrance into the present through forms that often blur the boundaries between pedagogy, family archive, and creative testimony. Among them is Caroline Slifkin, whose Holocaust arts project Fragments of Family (2016) translates intergenerational memory into a visual language accessible to younger audiences and educational settings. Integrated into school curricula, the project exemplifies how postmemory is not only preserved but actively shaped through acts of visual interpretation and classroom encounter. A similar dynamic operates in the digital circulation of survivor art by descendants. Morris Kagan, a second-generation survivor, shares his father Henry Kagan’s woodcarvings on social media, transforming objects once produced under coercion—carved for camp commanders as a means of survival—into posthumous acts of testimony. Detached from their original conditions of terror, these works acquire new ethical and mnemonic force, functioning as what Marianne Hirsch might describe as mediated inheritances: artifacts through which trauma is neither fully possessed nor relinquished, but continually re-inscribed across generations and platforms.
Another striking example is Mark L. Cohen’s large-scale exhibition A Legacy of Remembrance, a series of paintings, drawings, and prints centered on the Plaszow concentration camp near Kraków and on the figure of its commandant, Amon Goeth. Cohen revisits scenes only briefly suggested in popular narratives, transforming historical photographs and survivor accounts into monumental painted tableaux. His work confronts the unsettling coexistence of domestic normalcy and industrial murder, showing Goeth holding a child, walking dogs, or standing on his balcony overlooking the camp, rifle in hand. Cohen has described his intention as exposing the psychological architecture of genocide—the way ordinary routines and systematic brutality were interwoven—and tracing how such violence casts shadows across generations. Cohen expands Holocaust art beyond the geography of the camps, to include the moral landscapes that made them possible.
Reworking an archival photograph of the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto, Cohen transforms the documentary record into an act of postmemory, rendering deportation as a scene of suspended terror in which individuality dissolves into the anonymity imposed by mass violence. His paintings thus do not stand apart from the photographic record, but emerge from it, reactivating the visual technologies through which the Holocaust was first documented and later remembered.
Cohen expands Holocaust art beyond the geography of the camps, to include the moral landscapes that made them possible.
Photography stands alongside art as one of the most consequential forms of Holocaust testimony. Images were taken by perpetrators intent on bureaucratic record-keeping, by prisoners who risked execution to document daily life, and by Allied soldiers who confronted the camps at liberation. Among the most significant of these records is the Auschwitz Album: A Book Based Upon an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor, Lili Meier (1981), discovered in 1945 by survivor Lilly Jacob (Lilly Jacob-Zelmanovic Meier). The album documents the arrival and selection of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau, offering one of the few sequential photographic records of the camp’s systematic processing of Hungarian Jews. The Auschwitz Album was formally published in book form following its 1980 donation to Yad Vashem, bringing its images into wide circulation in Holocaust scholarship and exhibitions. The complete digitized album is publicly accessible through Yad Vashem, extending its afterlife from a fragile, tangible object into a digital site of collective memory and historical transmission.
As Susan Sontag reminds us in Regarding the Pain of Others (2004), images of suffering do not automatically produce understanding; without context and care, they risk hardening into spectacle rather than awakening moral attention. Remembrance is therefore not innocent. With the last witnesses of the Holocaust receding from the world, memory will soon reside almost entirely in archives, museums, and classrooms. In this historical transition, visual culture acquires renewed urgency. Images cultivate empathy without simplifying suffering and hence compose a counter-archive. They speak not in certainty but in fragments, preserving grief, dignity, and unresolved humanity where each photograph thus becomes an argument against disappearance.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, to look at these images is not only to recall how people died, but how they lived: how they imagined, created, loved, and endured within a world structured for their erasure.